Freak
by Maribor
Summary: The story of how Sally and Sherlock met, fell together and fell apart and perhaps the surprising origins of the nickname, "Freak". Very Pre-ASIP. My newest and strangest ship, it certainly surprised me. Sally/Sherlock or I suppose Shally.


**_When we see Sally interact with Sherlock for the first time she's angry, bitter, disgusted by him. To me it always seemed to go beyond just a professional dislike. It seemed personal. Just as his snide comment about "the state of her knees" seemed personal. He addresses her as "old friend". She warns John to stay away from him and that "he get's off on it." She tells him in no uncertain terms that "he will always let you down. Always." It just all screams that they have a history and I wondered just how Sally knew what gets him off and how he had let her down. So I decided to write a history for them. My first ever Sherlock fanfic. Hope I get it right, I'm mostly a "Doctor Who" girl so it's a bit unusual for me to step off the TARDIS and into the real world but here goes._**

* * *

**FREAK**

"Freak." She'd said affectionately as he offered her a chip. Of course she didn't mean it.

He'd looked affronted and rolled his eyes but after all this time she knew better.

"Mustard on chips is disgusting." She'd said with teasing authority.

"Not an inquisitive bone in your body is there, Constable Donovan."

He doesn't smile and that doesn't bother her. At least in the beginning, their beginning, Sherlock Holmes did not smile with his lips. He smiled with every feature besides his lips, the crinkle around the eye, the flash of a gaze, the raise of a brow. He was a language and for some reason it became imperative to Sally Donovan that she become fluent.

* * *

They'd laid down the ground rules early, each one trying to talk the other out of it. And this was only after they both insisted that neither of them were interested in a relationship.

"You'll never come first." He said just around the time she'd spoken. "I'm never going to drop everything for you."

"My work comes first." They'd both said at the same time.

"If you want to try this it's your funeral, mate." She'd said with a shrug. "Blokes get tired of me right quick because I'm not one to take anybody's shit."

"If I want to try? It isn't about what I want to try and even were I to want to, Donovan, you wouldn't last out the week..."

She couldn't quite recall what he'd said after that. It didn't matter as she'd echoed a similar sentiment and meant it.

"I've been dumped mid date, Sherlock. Not much can shake me anymore." It was true too. At the time it had hurt. Coming back from the loo and finding a hastily scribbled 'This probably wouldn't work out, love' note scribbled on the back of a credit card petrol receipt. But somehow, talking to him about it the sting was gone.

She liked this, the frankness, the wrangling back and forth, the race to the bottom to admit their worst faults. The mutual effort to push the other one away.

"What have you been told time and time and time again in your interactions with people?"

He paused for a moment.

"You let me down."

It should have been a red flag. But then again she was a red flag. The two of them together were an enormous crimson carpet that just screamed Stop. Go no further. Turn back. Here there be dragons.

"And you?"

"I'll never be enough, will I?" She said after a moment.

Another attempt to shove away from each other. Except it didn't work.

* * *

They'd met at a cafe.

No, that wasn't exactly right. She'd seen him at the cafe that she went to each day before work. She noticed him because he was oddly handsome. but she was usually busy and extremely anal about being late so she rarely paid him any mind. He was just a staple. Always there. Just as reliable as the chalkboard that listed the days specials.

She stopped in late, very late after work one evening. There was a case she still wanted to pore over at home and she'd need some caffeine for that. To her surprise he was there. She wondered if he was still there. Did he ever leave. She paid for her coffee, glanced at him as she passed by and left. There was a bus stop just past the little restaurant that she caught to work but from there she could walk home. She was nearly to her flat when she heard the footsteps so close behind her, then a scuffle and a thump. She had her gun drawn before she could clearly make out the two dark figures on the ground.

"Oi, both of you, on your feet and hands where I can see them." One of them began to rise, slowly, deliberately, hands raised. The other figure was still for just a moment before he clamored to his feet and broke into a run. In his scramble to get up she noticed a knife fall from his jacket. She took off after him and and tackled him to the ground fairly easily a good 30 seconds before the other figure caught up to them. Kneeing the knife owner in the back she wrenched his hands behind him as she affixed the cuffs. The other figure stood by, palms raised, his posture almost casual.

"I believe you just caught the rapist that's been in all the papers. Well done."

"You keep quiet and don't move."

Everything after that happened fairly quickly. One of her neighbors had seen the commotion and called the police. They arrived, she gave her statement, they questioned Knife-man who'd been just about to use said knife on her and they questioned Shadow-man who once he stepped into the yellow pool of a streetlight was no longer shadowy at all.

They fussed over her as she sat in the back of the ambulance but the worst she gotten was a skinned elbow. She shuddered at what might have happened and then pushed it out of her mind.

"You look no worse for wear." Came a surprisingly deep and rather melodious voice.

"You're the bloke from the cafe. I suppose I should thank you for everything back there."

"You didn't really seem as though you needed me."

"I didn't. But thanks anyways. So, do you always follow women home?"

"I do when I don't like the look of someone who's intent on following them."

"Officer Sally Donovan." She says extending her hand.

He takes it.

"Sherlock Holmes."

* * *

The next day he isn't at the cafe and she's a bit disappointed. The day after that her shift changes and she arrives at the cafe at noon and he is there. She sits herself down at his table. She orders. It's pointless in her opinion to mince about and bat eyelashes. If you want something you make yourself known and you take it.

For the first two weeks their conversation is rather dry and businesslike. Shoptalk essentially. She calls bullshit on his "Consulting Detective" title and when he doesn't crumple like a wounded little puppy she's impressed. They don't date. They expect. Though both of their hours change frequently, though they play catch-as-catch-can, they expect. He expects her to be there. He sometimes starts talking the moment she enters the door. She expects that sometimes he will give her exactly what she wants which is comfortable bloody silence. One day she enters, gets her coffee, sits down and neither of them say a word for an hour and a half. Why this works, why she needs this, why they both appear to want it she doesn't know. But it does. She does. They do.

After two months he announces that he's bored with the location, the scenery, the people. He'd rather be at his flat, closer to his work. He mentions his address. She nods and he leaves. Sally doesn't show up that night or the night after that. It takes three evenings for her to arrive at his place. She doesn't bring food because fuck that, she's nobody's doting little Suzy Sunshine. She brings herself and that's all. He's pleased and desperately fighting not to show it and that pleases her. His apartment is small and cluttered. The heat from his computer can be felt when she nears his desk and she wonders if he ever turns it off. There's the smell of cigarette smoke, heavy and stale in the air and she opens a window without bothering to ask him. The silence returns, comfortable, reassuring and occasionally and pleasantly it is broken.

* * *

The first kiss is awkward and she wonders how he can be so bad at it. He senses her displeasure and tries harder which makes it even worse. She pulls away and before he can get too annoyed she gives him a short lesson.

He improves rapidly. At the end of the evening she decides Sherlock Holmes is a quick study.

Their first time in bed together seemed equally headed for disaster. He was nervous and when he was nervous he apparently got snippy. This of course only raised her hackles and she damn near told him he could finish himself off with a wank in the bathroom. But damn him, and damn his eyes and those silly, romantic curls that just didn't fit that naturally abrasive nature. She wanted him and because of that she took pity. She didn't know if it had been a long time or if it had been never. It didn't matter, the approach was the same. Once she stilled the frantic hands and stifled the self aware irritable sighs with a kiss here and there he relaxed. He came the first time of course. What surprised her was that a half hour later they both came.

The next morning she got out of his bed craving coffee and a shower. She took the shower first and standing there under the spray in his bathroom she smiled softly.

She decides Sherlock Holmes is an apt pupil.

* * *

"When I was ten I stopped talking for seven months." He said one evening.

"When I was eight I handcuffed myself to our fireplace grate."

Neither of them bothered to explain why and somehow it was nicer that way. The information, the stories of their lives come out like the blurbs of books. Short, austere, threadbare, just interesting enough to make you want to glance at the cover again and maybe flip through a few of the pages. It was so very low pressure and she was able to keep her secrets and he kept his. It was nice.

She brings over a toothbrush. An overnight bag. She insists he come to her flat every now and then because "Not everything can always be about the comfort and convenience of Sherlock Holmes."

Sometimes she needs a break, autonomy. She takes it before he even has a chance to grow irritable and demand it. They get each other. More often than not she sleeps alone in their separate flats. But sometimes they lie next to each other, lost in dreams, breathing one another in, curls mingling on a shared pillow.

* * *

She didn't find out about the drugs until later.

She dominates him in bed when he's sober. He prefers it that way and it's well within the bounds of her comfort zone. One leg straddles him and within moments she off, bucking and riding him like a horse at a rodeo. It's usually then that he's the most truthfully vocal. He begs and pleads and bargains but she is immovable except for the way she bounces on his cock. His hands flutter about her hips, every so often daring to grip her but hesitant to stay.

When he was on coke it was a different story entirely. He'd come into his flat one morning after having been out the entire night. She spent a few hours worrying before finally passing out from exhaustion.

"Where the hell have you been?"

"Out. Do I detect a hint of anger in your voice?" He said dryly.

"You're a selfish prick. You don't do things like this you bastard."

"Don't I? On the contrary this is precisely what I do. And what's more, you love it. " He slipped his hand about her waist. That was new. He always faltered, never quite able to go this far. "Sally." He says and his voice is low and dangerous. His eyes are red rimmed. He's clearly been binging. His dark curls are damp with sweat. He smells like adrenaline and smoke and alcohol and fear and she is more turned on by him in this moment than she has ever been before and that is saying something.

"What?" She asks and she tries to force her voice out so that it sounds strong and challenging but she's not certain she succeeds.

"Do you know what I'd like to try...what I've always wanted to try? I want to strip you naked and take you up against that wall and then over that sofa and then on all fours on the bed. From then on we'll improvise.

He pulled her close and gave her a bruising kiss and she responded by biting at his lip almost hard enough to draw blood. Almost.

"You're high as the moon." She whispers against him.

"And you're not naked yet."

There was the unspoken between them, the word they shared.

Hurry.

Hurry, because I don't know how much longer this will last. He didn't say.

Hurry because I can only silence my better judgement, my reason, my sanity for so long. She didn't reply.

As he took her in all the places and ways he promised, as her curls too grew damp with sweat as he whispered some of the filthiest, vulgar things in her ear she'd ever heard, Sally had to chuckle.

"I-I didn't know you had it in you." She gasped out. Then there was a sharp intake of breath as he pushed her body closer to that wonderful zenith. "Sherlock the sex fiend." She said in a rush seconds before he made her come.

The next morning it was as if they both agree to pretend it had never happened.

But it had happened and it happened again two weeks later.

The third time she called in sick for work and dared to take a bump of coke herself. It was reckless and the height of stupidity and the two of them spent a drug filled day and night fucking and talking and fucking and she imagines that might have been the precise little fold in time when she fell in love.

She was young and perhaps for the first time ever she felt it.

The coke was fun, though she never developed a taste for it. It was recreation. It was an occasional decadent dessert but she didn't lose sleep over it. She didn't crave it. She only craved him.

Sherlock high was Sherlock unbound. His tongue was un-knotted. He told her things he'd never dare to with his head on straight. He touched her like she always wanted him to and he morphed into a lover that God help her she wanted to obey. When he told her he wanted to try a little bit of light bondage she sniffed a rather generous line from the mirror and giggled.

"You're a freak, aren't you? I never would have guessed."

"Bullshit. Of course you guessed. That's one of the reasons you're here." He replied. "The tie to you dressing gown will make do...for starters at least.

* * *

They never crossed paths on the job until one day they did. It was disconcerting to see him there. Worse still was the way her boss seemed to trust him implicitly. The rules she saw Lestrade breaking didn't sit right with her but she kept her mouth shut. They didn't have occasion to speak to one another not that she would have wanted to. Work was work. Play was play.

"We keep the job separate." She told him that evening. "You don't step on my toes and I don't step on yours. Agreed?"

"Agreed."

* * *

His flat is weird and over time it gets a bit weirder but she feels young enough to decide its quirky, messy and bearably oddball. That's part of the reason she's attracted to him because he's so damn odd.

When she sees her first suicide his arms are the first ones she seeks out.

"Sergeant Donovan if you can't handle the sight of a corpse you're going to make a poor detective."

She's just about to frown and push him away when she notices he's close enough to push away.

"Really," he continues. "If it's not the profession for you then perhaps you'd be doing yourself and the citizens of London a favor in discovering it now."

His movements and gestures don't fit his tone. He is bundling her up, pulling her close, wrapping her in his arms. She is standing in the kitchen and he is behind her, resting his chin atop her head. She dares to lean back against him and he doesn't shirk from the weight.

"They thought I was weird. In school they thought I was weird. At the academy they thought I was weird. I went in there knowing I had to be twice as good as any bloke because I was a woman and don't even get into the subtle priggish shit they gave me for daring to be a black woman. So I made sure I was better and smarter and faster to the answer than anyone there. I left them in the dust."

"Inferiority complex. Rather classic...and boring. If you ask me."

"It's only an inferior complex if you actually worry that you're inferior. Do you think I'm good at my job."

He sighs always unhappy to play this sort of Q &amp; A.

"You already know the answer to that."

He was right, she did, he couldn't bear to be around people he didn't respect even if he'd rather die than acknowledge that.

There's got to be someone you don't think you quite measure up to." She ventures.

"Hardly." But she noticed that his eyes flicked towards his mobile. His brother had called an hour or so ago and he'd let it go to voicemail.

* * *

He got sloppy when he switched to heroin.

Good energetic sex had been the perfect way to work out some of the tension from work and the tension from having him at work. After awhile the junk gave him dope dick. And that wasn't all, he got dull in general. Not stupid, mind, not even average, just a tiny bit slower. They'd lie in bed and while it still felt good to be in his arms it wasn't the same. Nothing was the same.

The row had started simply enough. She was at a crime scene, doing her job when Greg had paced up with irritation.

"Where is he?" He asked shaking his phone for emphasis. "I've texted him twice and called him three times."

She frowned and looked at him.

"How should I know?"

Lestrade gave her a hard glance and for a moment he didn't say anything.

"Oh come off it, Donovan, everyone-"

He was cut off as the man in question arrived in a cab.

"What do we have?" He asked.

"We have you refusing to answer your bloody phone." Her boss snapped at him.

She could tell instantly that he was high and shifted on her feet nervously. Sherlock, too energetic, talking too quickly and far too bleary eyed. But at the time she thought maybe only she would notice.

"I'm here now aren't I? Plus I thought Sally would have given you my apologies. Right, darling?"

She was mortified and as her mouth dropped open she felt sure she heard sniggering from some of her colleagues. Furious and ashamed she excused herself, ducking under yellow tape and heading back to the scene to do her job, as always.

They'd never actually moved in together but she did spend a great deal of time at his flat. She arrived there first after work, found his stash and waited for him to show up just so he could see her flush it down the toilet.

"I'm doing you a favor!" She shouted back at him when he started bellowing. "If you think for one second after the performance you put on today that the Yard won't be here by the end of tomorrow tossing this place for anything they can find you're out of your skull."

"He wouldn't do that." Sherlock responded quickly but she pounced on the unsurety in his voice.

"Wouldn't he? If there's one thing Greg Lestrade is not it's subtle. He'll grab five of his best all of whom are just chomping at the bit to take you down and he'll turn this place upside down."

"And would you be at the front of the charge?" He bit back.

"You know what, fuck you, Sherlock. I have been here for you time and time and time again. But I guess that's my fault and not yours." She said and started to gather her things together.

"I won't stop you." he says but his words don't match his movements. He's taken a cautious step towards her. His face is calm, remote, but his eyes are darting with fear. She looks closer, were it just the fear of what he was going to do once the high ebbed away she would have turned on her heel and never ventured back. But there was more there. And she both loved and hated that there was.

They stood there silently, neither willing to give an inch or retreat.

"Cold turkey." She finally said and it's an offer and a non negotiable demand. He hasn't been on it long enough to suffer severe withdrawal requiring hospitalization. Plus she know a doctor who owes her a favor or three. If things got hairy he'd come.

"Coke as well?" he asks and she knows what he's saying. As fucked as it was that white powder had opened a door, there had been a deepening of their relationship that had outlasted the high. But it wouldn't work. They'd have to find another way.

"Goddamn right."

"Cigs?"

"Fucking hell you think I want to deal with you off nicotine?"

He doesn't smile but the corners of his mouth twitch upwards and the wild feral look in his eyes dulls a bit. His posture relaxes and he no longer looks like an animal simultaneously fearful of being cornered and abandoned.

"You like this chaos." He says quietly and it's neither an offer nor a demand for concession.

She concedes anyway.

"It sets me right. At least a bit of it does. You make me feel upside down Sherlock and I don't hate it. But I don't want to fall."

"We're an odd match." he says.

She nods and they stare at each other for a bit longer, sizing the other person up, as though planning their next grappling move, their next hold.

"Freak." The both say softly at the same time and this time they are smiling.

"Alright." Sally says. "I'm off to the shop. I'm warning you, this detox is going to be ugly. We're going to need new sheets, buckets, water, pain relievers, anti-diarrhea meds, anti-nausea meds, soup and I suppose anything else I can think of. You want something?"

He shakes his head no.

She walks up to him and before he can protest gives him a quick kiss on the lips.

"I'll be here for all of it, you know." She reassures him. "Whether you like it or not."

He almost doesn't say anything and she grabs her keys and heads for the door.

"I've got my mobile if you think of anything." She says and barely catches his voice as she closes the door.

"No one was here last time." he says, responding to her previous statement.

Last time.

She closes the door and gets into her car and realizes that for everything she thinks she knows about him she knows nothing at all.

Those days are that follow are difficult, brutal in fact. He's mean and angry one moment and shockingly docile the next. It's the tears that disconcert her the most, especially the ones that don't come from the pain or exhaustion. But rather that same deep well she had, the one blocked off by rock and stone. Because if you let yourself drink from it you'll never stop drinking and it will consume you. You will consume you. And still she holds him and cries with him in the sweat and the stink and the misery of it all and she loves him even harder than she did before.

There were four months after his detox that were...though she hesitated to call it this...magical. They didn't fuck anymore. But that was ok. She also didn't have to ride him into submission anymore either and that was ok. The part of her that was unaccustomed to his changed nature rebelled and tensed slightly when he moved atop her. All these months together and they had never, ever had sex in the missionary position. When he entered her she released a soft, fluttery sigh.

"Alright, Sally?" He asked with concern.

He hadn't heard her make that sound before. She hadn't heard herself make that sound before. Nodding she thrust her fingers into his curls and encouraged him to continue.

He didn't say, I love you. Neither did she. But when he came it was with a soft whimper muffled by her lips pressed to him. When she came it was with a tight coil in her chest and tears in her eyes. He nuzzled her neck, holding her as they slept and she dared to dream of a silly, absurd and imaginary and completely impossible day when their initials might be the same. It wasn't that he was even so different. He wasn't suddenly demonstrative or romantic, he was still just as stunted and weird and socially inept as always. But exposure to Sherlock was like building up an immunity. Your first meeting he lays you low and emotionally its as if you've contracted the flu and a stomach bug and fallen into a patch of poison ivy all at the same time. He gets under your skin and in your blood and your whole body revolts. The white blood cells assemble and try and force this man out of your life. But if you kept at it and kept up the exposure, after awhile things settled. And except for the occasional weekly...alright sometimes daily flare up you barely even had an itch. And even then, it was a pleasantly annoying itch, one you took a weird sort of pleasure in scratching. That was Sherlock and one day in bed she'd told him so.

"I'm an itch?" He'd asked.

"Mmmhmm."

"You give compliments almost as well as I do."

"Ah but see you knew I was complimenting you."

He didn't answer. Only rolled his eyes in that way she loved.

"And what are you talking about?" She continued. "You never give compliments."

* * *

He needed to fill the hours, he read voraciously, he studied anything and everything, he played the violin, he bickered with his brother but he didn't take a case. Not one. She saw him once or twice lurking about a crime scene and when she got home...she called it home now...he would pepper her with questions about what was going on. But for the most part her kept his deductions to himself. She hadn't expected cold turkey to encompass everything.

Eventually he got bored. Surprisingly not with her but just a general sort of boredom. His mind was getting sluggish, he said. He started taking cases again. One or two here and there and while it didn't make her happy, what could she say? They had no agreement, not about this. Not about anything really. Her friends knew she was involved with someone but she'd seen to it they'd never met Sherlock. And he...well besides Greg he didn't appear to have any friends. Were they even friends? She really didn't know. She and Sherlock didn't refer to each other with endearments or labels. They were simply there, firmly ensconced in one another lives.

* * *

She's worried things might change when he went to Florida and she's right, they did. He came back different, harder, more reptilian. He announces that he's moving. And it's fine because Baker Street is closer to her flat and it's a better neighborhood and Mrs. Hudson is terribly nice.

But he'd changed, he was more arrogant, more withdrawn, his time spent on the computer or in the lab at St. Barts had increased ten fold. The flat is a bit dark, a bit rundown and he starts to look rundown within it. She recalls when he used to leave the casework behind when he came home. Or at the very least it had it's spaces, few and far between. But now there were samples in the main refrigerator, a skull on the mantle, blood spatter experiments in the loo, a set of severed fingers in the freezer.. She didn't like it. She didn't like the way he sat there listening to the police scanner like other blokes listened to football matches. She didn't like the way his eyes lit up. She didn't like the wholly inappropriate lusty look...as though it were turning him on.

She didn't feel as young as she used to.

Their last good period together was right after she broke her leg. She slipped and fell on a patch of ice and landed all wrong. She's surprised at how concerned he seems about her. Well, concerned for Sherlock. She's says she'll be fine getting around her flat. She's not an invalid. She can hop and she has crutches. He calls her an idiot and says she'll stay with him. She agrees and for awhile it's like it was during their best times. She's on leave from work and happy and Mrs. Hudson makes lovely cups of tea.

* * *

It shatters when Mary Dodd is kidnapped. A young mother of three goes missing on her way to the market. Sally is dusting for prints when he appears. That's not unusual. The fact that he walks past her and doesn't say anything straight away isn't unusual. They don't typically chat.

She watches the way he talks to the husband with a smile, a soft voice, a gentle nod and then she watches how it all drops from his face the second he turns away. She overhears his cold summary of the facts to DI Salton. She watches him observe one of the children crying in their fathers arms like it's an irritation. She overhears him tell Salton that they're looking for a corpse.

It unnerves her. He unnerves her and worse yet she realizes it isn't the first time. She realizes she's been purposefully avoiding things like this. Avoiding listening to him, avoiding looking at him, cutting him off mid sentence when he started talking about cases. She was silencing him as best he could and silencing the alarms in her head that told her she was silencing something.

* * *

She wasn't sure when the shouting started. These days who could tell anymore. They just moved from argument to argument.

"Do you have any idea what you looked like today, what you sounded like!? What if they had heard you? The dad, the kids?"

"They didn't and what if they had? Better to prepare for the inevitable than persist in fantasy."

"I don't understand you!" She shouted and there was no jest in it, no play. This isn't foreplay. This is endplay. "Does it ever get to you? Any of it?"

He regarded her coolly.

"No."

That was all. Just no.

She looks around his flat and realizes she's no longer comfortable there. It's too dark. In both meanings it's just too bloody dark.

"If I died would you care. If I were out there, murdered, shot to death, bled to death in the middle of the road would you care?"

"I don't care about hypothetical." He said testily.

At that she scoffed.

"Your whole life is hypothetical, Sherlock! All of it! That's all you deal with because reality is too goddamn scary for you!"

"You don't wear irrational well, Sally. It's not a good look for you." He narrowed his eyes as he spoke and it took everything she had not to slap him. "Let's talk about the real reason you're upset with me. It's not because I showed up unannounced it's because I was working with Salton instead of you. I chose someone over you and you find that incredibly distressing. You no doubt see that as some sort of parallel to our relationship. That simple act of choosing the better person for the job has called all your insecurities to the surface."

She hated him in that moment. Hated him for making her feel this way, weak, emotional, childish. She hated that they'd both allowed the lines of work and play to cross and now it seemed they were tangled beyond repair.

"Don't you stand there and deduce me. Don't you presume to think you can unravel me like a ball of string. What I saw today...when I see how you look at people, how you talk to them, how you manipulate them...it disgusted me. This has got nothing to do with Salton. This is about you, Sherlock. This is about who you are. You scare me. Do you know that? You scare me! Watching you today, it's like you were missing something... like you..."

"Weren't enough." He supplied. And though the words sounded so familiar she wouldn't remember why until three nights hence and the recollection would see her ball up into a messy, teary fetal position in bed. "I am what I am, Sally. But perhaps I'll never be enough for you. And if that's the case then you have truly let me down." His words were full of bite and ice.

"I let you down?" She asked incredulously. "I counted on you too much. I promised myself I would never, ever count on anybody ever again. But I was stupid enough to let it happen with you. And look what happened. Fine, Sherlock..." She took one more look around Baker's Street and it felt like a last look. "I think we've let each other down for the last time. I don't want to do this anymore. Any of it."

She went about, gathering her things while he stood in the middle of the room watching her. She shoved books, clothes, a stained coffee mug, her toothbrush and various other soon to be relics of their life together into a bag, took his key off her key ring and dropped it on the table.

"There, it's all yours now and you can sink into whatever the hell it is you want to sink into you. You've been skating about the rim for so long now. Why not just dive in?"

She opened the door to the flat prepared to leave but paused when she heard him start to speak.

"Sally..." And his voice was almost tender, strained at having to call forth and display such emotion but tender none the less.

In a moment she'd wished she hadn't stopped. In a moment she'd wished she'd just kept walking because then she wouldn't have had to hear the horror that came out of his mouth next.

"If you were dead, lying in the street...murdered...I would do my best to solve your death as expeditiously as possible and see the pepetrator brought to justice."

He'd stood there waiting for a reply but she had only gawped at him, shaking her head slightly in disbelief. That was it. That was his offering. That was the best he could do. The best he would ever do. Perhaps the best he had ever done.

"Does that give you the answer you need?"

"Yeah." She said still staring at him, almost unable to pull her eyes away. He was so alien that she wasn't even quite sure what she was looking at. "Yeah I believe it did."

She stepped through the door and pulled it sharply shut behind her.

* * *

Strangely though this is when it ends, this isn't when she considers it over. It's over when the the only interaction they have with each other are snide comments and vicious retorts. He is a man wounded. He has twisted it in that brain of his that she somehow skewered his pride as opposed to him shoving her out of his life.

Then again some nights she felt she was just as much at fault as he was.

It's over when she sees him with his new...friend? It's over when she doesn't play her cards close enough to the vest as asks if he followed him home...like he had done with her.

It's over when he turns that chill in his eyes towards her. It's over when he intimates that she blew Anderson when in reality her knees were wrecked because she'd been crawling around on the floor trying to figure out why that poor boy had killed himself.

It has taken a solid two years for it to be over. And she doesn't know why she cares. Can't for the life of her figure it out. And that is beyond annoying because her entire existence often hinges on figuring things out. He's become haunting window dressing in her life. There were men before him and there have been men after him. If she was alone it was because she wanted to be.

She can't figure out if he's Lestrade's pet or vice versa but he's impossible to avoid nowadays.

She wonders if he hates her. She wonders if she hates him. She wonders what it is she hears in his voice when he introduces her to his "colleague" as an "old friend".

There are times she wonders if perhaps she imagined it all. The affection, the hard fought affection that was like drawing blood and gristle and heart from a stone. But it had been real, hadn't it?

It's over when he treats her like she was nothing at all.

It's over when she wants to have a go at him, just one punch at that smug face.

It's over when she realizes she's actually terrified of what he's become...maybe what he always was.

It's over when she forgets how his laugh sounded and how his hand felt on her hips, her breasts, her cheek.

It's over when she calls him Freak.

It's over when she means it.

* * *

*****Continued in "Bad Penny"*****


End file.
